“I just don’t understand why you chased after them,” said Sarah after Max had relayed the whole story of the incident with Seth. “Like, you didn’t have that much money on you. You don’t have a credit card or something hard to replace. Would it have been so bad to lose your wallet, save yourself from that final blow to the stomach?”

Sarah had a point. It had been stupid to fight back, but then he thought of Elle’s note. It was the only thing that connected the two of them. The only proof of her existence.

Until that note had randomly appeared in his locker twelve months earlier, Max had assumed his sister had died in the same car crash from ten years ago that had killed his parents and left him with two immobile legs.

“I couldn’t leave Elle’s note behind,” said Max.

“Oh,” said Sarah.

Sarah’s realization hung between them, anchoring the conversation into silence.

She was the only one Max had ever told about the note. The only person he remotely trusted out of everyone he knew. Even still, he could tell Sarah struggled to believe him. She wanted to believe him, but she struggled to.

“I know you don’t want to hear this,” she said. “But how do you know that note wasn’t a prank?”

“I don’t,” said Max, staring at the looming tower beyond the wall. “But here are the facts. Our lockers don’t have any slits in them. So the only way someone could sneak a note into one of them was if they had my lock combination—which, as far as I know, nobody does—or they snuck it in when I had it opened, but surely I would’ve noticed in that case?”

“So how did it end up there then?” asked Sarah. “Magic?”

“Why is it so hard to believe a note magically appeared in my locker,” said Max. “When every day we’re confronted by a freaking tower that appeared out of nowhere?”

This was the curious and frustrating question that every citizen of Zestiris who lived in the outer-rim had to confront day after day. How did one go about their daily life—full of all of its mundane activities—while unexplainable magic loomed over them and stared them right in the face in the form of a tower that had appeared out of thin air?

The tower had first appeared forty years ago in 2045. It emerged in the middle of nowhere on the northeastern coast of the United States, between Concord, New Hampshire and Boston, Massachusetts.

A decade later, a city with walls and rules had been erected around the tower, and that city came to be known as Zestiris.

The reasons for the tower’s appearance remained a mystery to this day.